Journal Article: Felon Disenfranchisement Laws and the Feedback Loop of Political Exclusion: the Case in Florida

I love journal articles!! I am a fanatic when to comes to providing sources and believe that you can learn a lot from academics and professors. If it were up to me, I would be reading different peer-reviewed and scholarly journals for life. I will list from time to time certain articles that are of importance to me and hopefully you will enjoy it too. I will not copy and paste the whole article, but I will give you the key points I felt were very strong in order to discuss ways of making things better, improve our relations, and combat the different elements of issues that work for some but not all in the United States. — AcademicHustler1975

Journal Article

“Felon Disenfranchisement Laws and the Feedback Loop of Political Exclusion: the Case of Florida” by Anthony Jamal Phillips and Natalie Deckard — Published by The Journal of African American Studies on September 28, 2015

Florida leads the nation in disenfranchising felons, especially African-Americans. Approximately 520,500 African-Americans, 23 % of the state’s Black voting age population, could not vote because of felony convictions in 2010. — The Sentencing Project 2010

Key Article Points

The #BlackLivesMatter struggle was born of the shared revulsion for the ways in which Black bodies have been criminalized and ultimately deemed unworthy of life in a carceral nation — training a spotlight on the long-standing issue of police killings that had previously received little attention outside of the African-American community.

Attempting to control the electorate in order to better control election outcomes is not new in US history. As early as 1787, the Three-Fifths Compromise constructed state population for the purposes of congressional representation as comprising the aggregation of full White lives and African-American lives at 60 % of the whole.

Trayvon’s state and the state in which law enforcement is estimated to have killed the largest number of its Black residents from 2013 — the year after Trayvon’s death — to July, 2015.

In states such as Florida, however, stringent felony disenfranchisement laws create communities that are systemically excluded from the political process.

Lacking the ability to vote means existing without representation, and the disproportionate disenfranchisement of a community’s members very strongly affects the representation accorded these communities.

In Florida, over 23 % of African-Americans cannot vote — nearly the majority of African American men living in the state.

Florida has the highest rates of African-American disenfranchisement through anti-felon laws in the USA. In Florida, the form and shape of felony disenfranchisement laws may determine the politics of the entire nation.

African-Americans suffer from the widespread institutionalized discrimination that systemically denies them the ability to accumulate wealth, they are disproportionately represented among the poorest Americans.

Anyone watching the news or opening their social media accounts knows that Florida is a particularly dangerous place for a Black man. Although the movement the state’s egregious violence spawned, #BlackLivesMatter, is a national one, it would be a mistake to understand violence against Black bodies as equally problematic throughout the country.

Florida is the sort of epicenter of state violence against African-Americans, and this research places the locus of that violence in the disenfranchisement of the Black community through the use of felony disenfranchisement laws.

The fight for equality, for recognition, for representation, and, indeed, for Black lives begins where leaders of the Civil Rights Movement believed it began — with universal suffrage. — Anthony Jamal Phillips and Natalie Deckard

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